Milpa

In agriculture, a milpa is a field for growing food crops and a crop-growing system used throughout Mesoamerica, especially in the Yucatán Peninsula, in Mexico.

[2] In the Mexican states of Jalisco and Michoacán and in central Mexico as well as Guanacaste Province Costa Rica, as an agricultural term milpa denotes a single corn plant; in El Salvador and Guatemala, milpa specifically refers to harvested crop of maize and the field for cultivation.

A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jícama, amaranth, and mucuna ... Milpa crops are nutritionally and environmentally complementary.

The milpa, in the estimation of H. Garrison Wilkes, a maize researcher at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, "is one of the most successful human inventions ever created.

"[4] Milpitas, California, derives its name from the Nahuatl term "milpa" followed by the Spanish feminine diminutive plural suffix "-itas".